Good Things do NOT come in small packages

One of the things you get used to with many diseases today is some kind of imaging - there are MRIs and Pet Scans (quite frankly I thought it would be wonderful to send my dog to the imaging - but that is not the meaning of the term).  There is also ultrasound.

I will admit it.  I don't like small spaces.  And as I have aged I am less and less willing to be in small spaces.   In our second house (in the late 1970s - which was built in the 1920s) I actually crawled into the space under the house and installed a very early type of wiring for moving sound and video to two locations in the house (Living room and master bedroom).  The space was so small you could not turn and had to scuttle on your back to get from one place to the other.

I have a good friend in Mexico who is a retired Psychologist who has said to me "we can fix that" - but somehow I think I like being idiosyncratic.  So in theaters and airplanes I always pick an aisle seat.  And I am not likely to do anymore crawl space installations.  Luckily our current house was built on a slab.

The first time I had to do an MRI was in Mexico - I had fallen on the street by tripping on a cobblestone late one Friday afternoon.  I went to the hospital in Queretaro and was told I should do an MRI.   The MRI moves you into a small and very noisy place.  (See image above) The whole process takes about 30 minutes - I thought one way to make the process tolerable was to count on my fingers the time - 30X60 = 1800 units.  I tapped them out on my fingers which were at my side.   But even that small amount of movement made my results unreadable.   When I got back to the US I learned that one can take a form of Valium and lose the claustrophobic reaction mostly.   So for all the procedures that required some kind of imaging I simply took a couple of pills and was relaxed enough to be able to get through the procedure.

Next on my list, after my third infusion, is a series of tests which include a Pet-Scan and an Ultrasound.   Both will give my medical team and idea of whether the Chemo is working.  All of the indicators seem to be positive from energy level (one friend said my cantankerous nature has re-evolved) and blood work.    I did the third infusion yesterday - and it went well.  I usually take an iPad to the infusion - and yesterday I watched Mutiny on the Bounty - the Brando version.  It is long and Brando throughout the film looks like he has been affected by a severe bout of foppishness.   The movie ends, a bit more than 3 hours after it started with Brando saving the sextant and then getting burned in fire and then the death scene with all the melodrama he could muster.   The true story of the bounty is much more interesting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutiny_on_the_Bounty).